


Fever Dreams

by Eatsscissors



Category: The Eagle (2011)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-19
Updated: 2011-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-17 03:09:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,188
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/172278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eatsscissors/pseuds/Eatsscissors
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his sickness, Marcus dreams of many things.  References to violence and sex, nothing terribly graphic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fever Dreams

The last thing that Marcus felt before the surgeon's knives finally plunged him beyond consciousness was the weight of Esca's hands leaning down hard on his shoulders; the last thing that he saw was Esca's blue eyes, hooded as ever, and pressed so close to his own with the effort of keeping him still that all the rest of Esca's face was a meaningless blur. Marcus clenched his teeth together so hard that they were in danger of breaking off at the gums so that he would not shout, but then he fell into darkness and could not longer say what he did.

He spoke to his father in dreams, and to visions of his mother and his stepfather, attempting to explain that he had done all that he could. His stepfather sniffed and turned away in perpetual disapproval, his mother patted at his cheek the way that she had done when he had been small and had not known yet what it meant to be honored or dishonored, or that war did not go on an actual battlefield the way that it did when one was still playing with a wooden sword. His father cupped the back of his head, and leaned close, and whispered words of advice that evaporated away before Marcus could force them into making sense, no matter how he tried. After several attempts, he realized that his father was not speaking Latin at all, but the harsh, guttural sounds of the Britons.

Something bitter trickled into his mouth and down his throat. Marcus spat it out the first time, and then the second, but by the third attempt he was just so thirsty. The hand against the back of his head retreated; Marcus heard Latin being spoken in a far corner of the room. He turned his head towards it and tried to speak, only for the surgeon to shush him and say, "Sleep, son, sleep." He sounded nothing like a Briton.

 _I'm not your son_. It sounded petulant and unworthy even in his mind. He was glad that his tongue was too thick to speak it aloud.

*

Before leaving for the final campaign, his father had brought him home a puppy. "To help you become a man," he had said, tapping Marcus solemnly on the tip of his nose while his mother had worked on the weaving that they were wealthy enough to pass on to slaves, if that would not appear ostentatious and wasteful, and raised her eyebrows silently. Because to be a man was to wield power over others, and to wield power required discipline, steadiness of character. With Marcus's father gone on campaign, Marcus would be the only male in the house, "and we can't leave your education solely to the hands of your mother, can we?" His mother had set down her weaving and cleared her throat in a very pointed way. Though the rest of his father's face remained composed, there had been a twinkle in his eyes as he had looked back at her, a moment of silent communication before she went back to her work with a softened mouth. Marcus had stared down at the puppy, which was one of the rangy, half-wild breeds favored by those British tribes who had allied themselves with Rome for this season at least, more wolf than dog. The puppy thumped its tail once, twice, against the floor, though Marcus realized a moment later that that was more about the olive pit that the puppy had found underneath one of the tables than any interest in Marcus himself. His mother blurted out something unfeminine that made his father laugh and then rushed to rescue the animal before it could choke, shoving it into Marcus's arms and then going to berate the slave had been in charge of clearing away the last meal. The puppy stopped wagging its tail as soon as it felt Marcus's arms encircling its belly and looked at him with large, inscrutable eyes.

Someone was holding Marcus up from behind; he came to with his hands wrapped about their forearm as if they were the only things keeping him up. The person behind him was wearing a tunic. Marcus was decidedly not, though he was shivering much too hard to either worry or appreciate the lack of clothing. Even less so when he realized that old Stephanos was standing in front of him in a soaked tunic that nonetheless outlined much more of his body than Marcus ever had cared to see. He was scrubbing at Marcus's chest with a rough cloth, and even in his addled state Marcus could smell the particular stink of sickness-sweat rising off of his body with the steam. But he was still so cold.

"Hold him up higher, slave," Stephanos grunted. Marcus tilted his head up and saw Esca's impassive blue eyes watching him. As always, even up close, there was no hint of spontaneity in his face. "You won't be so lucky as to find yourself back in the arena if he drowns."

Marcus was in no danger of sliding beneath the water, but he struggled to bear his own weight at the same time that Esca grunted and shifted him. He could not hold back the short sound when his bad leg betrayed him, or stop himself from gripping at Esca's harm hard enough to surely bruise. Marcus set his jaw before the noise could go any further and tried to keep breathing. He tried to loosen his grip upon Esca, only for the shivering to return.

"What was the dog's name?"

Marcus jerked his head up quickly and nearly collided with Esca's chin. They fit awkwardly against one another, the more so because Esca was leaning back as far away from him as he could without outright letting Marcus slide beneath the water.

"It died." Slipped from the house one night and into the orchard, found a way to choke on an olive pit, after all. Dog of that breed was never meant to be this far south, anyway, their helpful neighbor said, smiling at Marcus's mother in a way that was not quite appropriate considering that her husband had only been gone for a handful of days. Three years later and after wedding Marcus's mother, the new stepfather had offered Marcus another puppy, his one and only gesture at peace between them. It had been floppy-eared and docile and stupid, and Marcus had not been sad when it had run away soon after. His new stepfather had taken it as an omen and not tried again.

The concoction poured down his throat that night tasted even thicker and more bitter, but the hand guiding his head didn't try to call him its son or pretend to be anything more than what it was. Maybe that was why Marcus gripped after it so hard, until a second hand was required before he loosened his hold.

*

The first girl that Marcus ever bedded was a camp follower of Gaul blood, pale-skinned and sturdy-limbed, with heavy breasts even though she was no older than sixteen. Her eyes had been a pale blue that reflected back silver when she had tilted her face up towards the night sky. She made soft, breathy noises from the back of her throat when Marcus pushed into her, and he hardly noticed and cared not that she still had fading marks from earlier men marking her hips and old scars from a slaver's whip across her back. She had whispered sweet things into his ear sincerely enough when he had slipped the sesterces into her hand, and smiled winningly when he had promised to visit her again with a present that would be only for her. The older men had laughed at him when he had returned to the barracks with the smell of her lingering on his skin and a grin on his face which said one thing and one thing only. He had shrugged them off and gone to sleep.

There were skirmishes a few days later, a small thing, news of the wall making the mainland bold even after generations of docilely accepting the tethers of Rome. The attack came at night, so silently that Marcus would never sleep so soundly again. He fought against darkness and in little more than his tunic; when the morning came again, the fort commander was dead. So were many of the pale-skinned, pale-haired northern Gauls who were close enough to the last borders of the world to feel its breath now and again. A few of them looked no older than sixteen, too. Marcus didn't go looking for his pretty girl. He didn't want to know.

Whatever Marcus mumbled in his fever, Esca's hands were rough as they cradled his head to take broth and jerked away quickly when Marcus tried to grab for him. It was the first time that Marcus had ever heard Esca make a sound as he entered or left a room, too, clattering against the doorframe and spitting something out in Briton that Marcus undeniably knew to be a curse.

*

The eagle was new when his father gave it to him just before riding away; by the time that three years had passed and the neighbor was no longer just so and felt no need to hide how much he disapproved of Marcus's every word and deed, it was dark. Marcus had put an oily sheen on it by turning it over and over again between his fingers, staring towards the north. It was on its third cord about his neck. By the time that he made his first channel crossing, it was on its twelfth, and even that was badly beginning to fray. He wore it beneath his breastplate as he went to fight the Britons led by their mad Druid, and he wondered if his father had felt this way in his last moments. If he had regretted the deaths of the men who had followed him the way that Marcus regretted the deaths of the men of the patrol, if he had thought of their families afterwards. If he had had the time to worry over such things; the alternatives were a coward's flight or capture, and a slow death either way. In the arc of his arm throwing the spear, though, he thought of his men. His father came back to him under lurching darkness, the smell of horses and oxen heavy in his nostrils. Marcus fumbled for the eagle under his tunic, but it slipped away from his fingers. The cord must have broken again.

His father's face was blank and impassive, ready for anything to be read upon his features. He arose sometimes out of the clean southern sunshine from which Marcus saw him last and sometimes out of the mist in which Marcus is sure, on a good day, that he died, but he didn't speak. "Did I shame myself?" Marcus asked, again and again, but his father never answered. Marcus grabbed for him, but he slipped away each time. The wrist that he ultimately caught was thinner, and it twisted away before Marcus had time to do much more than realize it was there.

*  
Marcus awoke with the sticky-sour sweat that fever brought still coating his skin lightly, his throat terribly dry. Esca appeared in an instant to lift his head and tilt water down his throat; he must have been watching. Marcus put his hand upon Esca's wrist in order to steady himself and only then noticed that there were bruises on Esca's skin in the shape of fingers, near as dark as the tattoo on Esca's arm. He was still too thin; he must mark easily. Marcus fought back the urge to mark the days in the fading shapes of the gladiator's arena.

"Did I do that?" he asked instead. Marcus let his hand fall from Esca's arm when Esca shifted, before Esca could outright pull away. Esca's eyes were much too direct for a slave, and he did not mold himself to Marcus's wishes before Marcus could even voice them the way that Stephanos did.

Esca set the water cup on the bedside table and then stepped back with his hands demurely folded behind his back. "You weren't yourself," he said to Marcus in a tone that was like everything else that Esca did, proper and docile on the surface and running no further down. Esca regarded Marcus with his head tilted to one side and an ambiguous expression on his face; he finally gave the smallest bow that he could have expected to get away with without suffering punishment, even if Marcus was confined to a bed and couldn't administer it himself. A few steps away from the door, he turned back abruptly and set something on the bedside table beside the water cup. It was the wooden eagle with its dark, oil-stained wings.

"You threw that when you were in the fever," Esca said. "I thought that you might like it back." And then left again with his customary silence, leaving Marcus alone to his thoughts.


End file.
